Landen had
his developmental assessment yesterday at Harbor Regional in Long Beach.
Luckily Joi went with me. She was a huge help and took lots of
notes!! They did a complete evaluation on Landen - not just
speech/language. The therapist asked me a million questions and had lots
of toys for Landen to play with to see what he could do. She would have
him try to do tasks that would increasingly get harder and harder. Once
he failed performing 2 or 3 tasks in a row she would stop that section of the
testing. Some of the tasks were definitely above his age level in
complexity but they still gave it a shot. Landen surprised us with some
of them. He was so cute because after he did something he'd stop and clap
for himself. It was basically just a big play session for him. He
was worn out at the end! We're going to get a full report in a couple of
weeks but here are the results:
- Cognition: 16 months, 0% delay (Woohoo!!!! Smart boy!)
- Language, receptive: 9 months, 36% delay
- Language, expressive: 8 months, 43% delay
- Motor, fine: 18 months. 0% delay
- Motor, gross: 17 months, 0% delay
- Adaptive, self-care skills: 10 months, 29% delay
- Social/emotional skills: 13 months, 7% delay
Because of the very large delay identified in expressive
language, Landen qualifies for speech and language therapy. We don't know
where or at what frequency yet, but we're getting the process started. I
don't imagine we'll really get going until after the first of the year. We
got a big folder of information about the Early Start program (administered by
the state to help children with disabilities and/or delays) and we have a few
action items. The therapist explained how his lack of chewing/mouthing on
toys as an infant was directly related to his delay in eating table foods and
now his delay in speech. He never learned how to use all the muscles in
his mouth.
Joi wrote down a whole list of activities the therapist
suggested we do with Landen to help all the areas of his development.
There will definitely be "homework" that will need to be done while
he's at Mimi's and Lolo's. We're all going to need to start giving him
the extra help he needs to get caught up. John and I are SO relieved that
his delays are in areas that are 100% totally fixable. He just needs some
extra practice. Learning he had a large cognitive delay would have been
very difficult news to hear. Thank goodness our little genius is
excelling in that area. :) I am so grateful that I went with my gut
feeling and mentioned something to Barbara about his language
development. I just knew something wasn't quite right. Now we've
got the tools we need to move forward and get our little boy talking!
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